Nobody mentioned there’s a removespikes.pl script (download) that will remove these outliers from your rrds. I put together a quick shell script to make it quick for when I need to run it again:

!/bin/sh

for i in /path/to/graphs/rrd/*;
do
        perl removespikes.pl $i;
done;

If you have a ton of graphs a quick shell script to iterate through the directly may be quicker. If you only have a handful like me, no big deal.

Keep the script around for the next time you have spikes to deal with.

Unfortunately the build directions for Mac OS X are lacking (they don’t really exist). Building the dependencies didn’t really work for me. For anyone who wants to follow this, note that these are changes to the instructions, not replacements. It doesn’t discuss everything. I have only done this on Mac OS X 10.4.11. I have no idea if this works on any other version, though I suspect 10.5 will work fine.

For starters I used the following LDFLAGS:

LDFLAGS="-Wl,-blibpath:${INSTALL_DIR}/lib"

I’m not sure if -Wl is necessary or not, but I don’t think it’s harmful.

In general the directions listed on the build page are pretty strait forward and work fine on Mac OS X but I did encounter an issue once I started to compile Pango 1.17.5:

 gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -DG_LOG_DOMAIN=\"Pango\" -DPANGO_ENABLE_BACKEND -DPANGO_ENABLE_ENGINE -DSYSCONFDIR=\"/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/etc\" -DLIBDIR=\"/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/lib\" -I.. -DPANGO_ENABLE_DEBUG -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/cairo -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/freetype2 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/libpng12 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/freetype2 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include -xobjective-c -O3 -fPIC -Wall -MT libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.Tpo -c pangocairo-fontmap.c  -fno-common -DPIC -o .libs/libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.o
In file included from pangocairo-fontmap.c:29:
pangocairo-atsui.h:27:25: error: cairo-atsui.h: No such file or directory
make[4]: *** [libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.lo] Error 1
make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

After some experimentation I found that I had to update to a newer version of Pango. Which needs a newer version of GLib and Cairo. Which requires a newer version of Pixman. You’ve got to love how that cascades. Here’s what I changed:

Pixman

I ended up using Pixman 0.13.2 and doing:

tar -xzf pixman-0.13.2.tar.gz
cd pixman-0.13.2
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC"
make
make install

Cairo

Then I installed Cairo 1.8.6 using:

tar -xzf cairo-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd cairo-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --enable-xlib=no --enable-xlib-xrender=no --enable-win32=no  --enable-quartz=yes --enable-quartz-font=yes CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC"
make
make install

I modified a few configure flags to use quartz though I left --enable-quartz-image off because it’s experimental as of 1.8.6. Also some of the flags changed slightly between versions (xlib-render is now xlib-xrender).

GLib

I then upgraded GLib to 2.18:

tar -xzf glib-2.18.tar.gz
cd glib-2.18
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC"
make
make install

This took forever to build, but it worked fine.

Pango

I then finally installed Pango 1.22.4:

tar -xzf pango-1.22.4.tar.gz
cd pango-1.22.4
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --disable-tcl --disable-python
make
make install

If for some reason Pango doesn’t include Cairo as it’s backend like this when ./configure ends:

configuration:
        backends: Cairo FreeType X

Try using the following statements first:

CAIRO_CFLAGS="-I=/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/cairo"
CAIRO_LIBS=/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/lib/

Then run ./configure again.

Then compile RRDtool itself by following the directions as normal. This worked fine for me.

Cascading dependencies suck. There may have been an easier fix to my problem, but I wasn’t able to find it. Simply updating to newer versions of these libraries seemed like the best solution. That said, these aren’t officially sanctioned versions by the RRDtool team. Be warned.

Good luck to anyone else who tries this.

So much easier to read, and so much faster since your not spitting out graphics files every time the system polls. Not to mention the quality of the graphing image is much nicer. These are shrunk a little and they still look great.

MRTG is still running, but I think I’ll shut it down as soon as I can verify things are working the way I want.

One thing I really wanted to get going was monitoring the cable modem’s power levels. This is now implemented:

How pretty is that? I also moved my ping/latency graphs away from MRTG to RRDTool based graphs. Next up is interface traffic (when I get around to figuring out why it didn’t work when I just tried it).